It's been a very busy week here at FierceContentManagement as we prepare for the AIIM Expo next week in Philadelphia. We've prepared a special issue to highlight the show and we're launching our first digital book this week, a collection of One on One interviews. In the midst of all this, I had to visit my doctor on Monday for a routine appointment and I took the opportunity to quiz him about President Obama's electronic health records initiative. You may recall I touted his office as an example of one that had made the transition to electronic records fairly smoothly (as I wrote in "Obama's electronic medical requirements are within reach"), but when I talked to my doctor this week about this, he wasn't as enthusiastic about the plan as I would have thought. In fact he was downright negative.

What about primary care physicians?

My doctor is part of a dying breed in this country, the primary care physician or general practitioner. It doesn't have the glitz and glamor or the big bucks of a plastic surgeon or psychiatrist or any of the other myriad of specialties out there. It's about helping and caring for people on a daily basis, dealing with general health issues, making sure you mitigate risks and acting as the first line of defense before sending us to the more expensive specialists. Now, I'm not criticizing people who choose specialists. We need them too and after years and years of medical training, you can't blame people for going for the larger paychecks, but that's led to huge shortage of primary care physicians in this country.

When I asked my doctor about Obama's EMR plan, he responded that some of that money should be put toward encouraging medical students to become PCPs. His point was that the new generation of doctors needs a financial incentive from the government to push them down this path and that we should direct some of these millions of dollars toward that goal. He said without implementing both parts of the plan, "We'll have lovely electronic medical records, but no doctors to use them."

Not ready for prime time

He also said that the software as it exists today is not well suited for primary care settings. He described the initiative this way. He said imagine it's 1899 and we want to encourage the horseless carriage industry, so we shoot all the horses and force people to use automobiles. The auto technology is not really ready to handle it yet, but we force industry growth by taking away the old system. He says that's essentially where we are right now.

I was surprised by his negativity, but I don't think the goal of more primary care physicians and electronic medical records need to be mutually exclusive. We need to move toward a modern electronic record keeping system and we need to make sure we have enough doctors to use them. At the same time, I think it's important we hear this hard-working doctor's words because he's on the front line every day. His office is essentially an early adopter and he's saying that the software needs work, and he's using 1.0 technology to treat his patients.

Vendors can you hear me?

So intelligent vendors might be seeing this as an opportunity. There are a range of markets for electronic medical records software. The hospitals likely represent the biggest bite and the small doctor's practices the smallest, but if as a country we are heading down this path of electronic medical records we have to make sure that every one of these markets is served, and it may even be more important to make sure the primary care physician is well represented because this doctor is the one that most likely is treating us on a regular basis. We want this person confident and happy and all it's going to take is some good software, designed with their needs in mind. Surely, that's a problem that's within reach of solving. - Ron